Virtually all diet plans work if a person will stick with the plan long enough. Most of us seem to have trouble with that. I'm going to focus on just doing good for one day--and then another, and another, and another.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

The rule on this “dieting is easy” plan is to only weigh myself on the 1st of each month. Curiosity got the better of me and I checked my weight this morning. The scale showed 228 pounds. One pound lost after 10 days of really doing great on my diet. Disappointing results and a very good example of why I should only weigh once a month. Disappointing, but not really surprising.

I was at the Strong Family Reunion on July 17th. In the days following that trip I saw my weight hit 240 pounds at least once, and several times I was in the high 230’s. On August 1, about two weeks later, my weight was 229 pounds. That’s a big drop for such a short stretch of time.

After a drop of that magnitude, it’s natural for the body to put a halt to the weight loss. It makes sense that I’m on this plateau in the upper 220’s because the mid-230’s was becoming my natural weight over the course of the summer. The last 10 days might have been more about avoiding a rebound, so actually losing another pound might be a great result. It’s just that the long string of 229 and 228 pound weigh-ins would have been discouraging if I had been weighing every day.

I’ve learned my lesson and will wait until September 1st before checking my weight again. I’ll hopefully be past this current plateau and down to at least the 224-225 range. That would be a good result and with a bit more discipline and a bit more exercise, maybe we can push that result just a little closer to the 220 pound mark. That would be fantastic.